2023 Edelman Trust Barometer

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Press Release: “The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that business is now viewed as the only global institution to be both competent and ethical. Business now holds a staggering 53-point lead over government in competence and is 30 points ahead on ethics. Its treatment of workers during the pandemic and return to work, along with the swift and decisive action of over 1,000 businesses to exit Russia after its invasion of Ukraine helped fuel a 20-point jump on ethics over the past three years. Business (62 percent) remains the most and only trusted institution globally. …

Other key findings from the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer include:

  • Personal economic fears such as job loss (89 percent) and inflation (74 percent) are on par with urgent societal fears like climate change (76 percent), nuclear war (72 percent) and food shortages (67 percent).
  • CEOs are expected to use resources to hold divisive forces accountable: 72 percent believe CEOs are obligated to defend facts and expose questionable science being used to justify bad social policy; 71 percent believe CEOs are obligated to pull advertising money out of media platforms that spread misinformation; and 64 percent, on average, say companies can help increase civility and strengthen the social fabric by supporting politicians and media outlets that build consensus and cooperation.
  • Government (51 percent) is now distrusted in 16 of the 28 countries surveyed including the U.S. (42 percent), the UK (37 percent), Japan (33 percent), and Argentina (20 percent). Media (50 percent) is distrusted in 15 of 28 countries including Germany (47 percent), the U.S. (43 percent), Australia (38 percent), and South Korea (27 percent). ‘My employer’ (77 percent) is the most trusted institution and is trusted in every country surveyed aside from South Korea (54 percent).
  • Government leaders (41 percent), journalists (47 percent) and CEOs (48 percent) are the least trusted institutional leaders. Scientists (76 percent), my coworkers (73 percent among employees) and my CEO (64 percent among employees) are most trusted.
  • Technology (75 percent) was once again the most trusted sector trailed by education (71 percent), food & beverage (71 percent) and healthcare (70 percent). Social media (44 percent) remained the least trusted sector.
  • Canada (67 percent) and Germany (63 percent) remained the two most trusted foreign brands, followed by Japan (61 percent) and the UK (59 percent). India (34 percent) and China (32 percent) remain the least trusted..(More)”.

Data Free Flow with Trust: Overcoming Barriers to Cross-Border Data Flows

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Briefing Paper by the WEF: “The movement of data across country borders is essential to the global economy. When data flows across borders, it is possible to deliver more to more people and produce more benefits for people and planet. This briefing paper highlights the importance of such data flows and urges global leaders in the public and private sectors to take collective action to work towards a shared understanding of them with a view to implementing “Data Free Flow with Trust” (DFFT) – an umbrella concept for facilitating trust-based data exchanges. This paper reviews the current challenges facing DFFT, take stock of progress made so far, offer direction for policy mechanisms and concrete tools for businesses and, more importantly, promote global discussions about how to realize DFFT from the perspectives of policy and business…(More)”.

Five Conjectures to Explore in 2023 as They Relate to Data for Good

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Essay by Hannah Chafetz, Uma Kalkar, Marine Ragnet, Stefaan Verhulst: “From the regulations proposed in the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act to the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, 2022 was a year that saw many policy and technological developments. Taking stock of recent data and technology trends, we offer some conjectures as to how these ideas may play out over the next year. Indeed, predictions can be dangerous, which is why we position the below as conjectures — propositions that remain tentative till more evidence emerges — that can help advance the agenda and direction of responsible use of data for the public good focus areas.

Below, we provide a summary of the five conjectures that The GovLab will track and revisit throughout 2023.

Conjecture 1. In 2023 … non-traditional data may be used with increasing frequency to solve public problems.

Complex crises, from COVID-19 to climate change, demonstrate a need for information about a variety of developments quickly and at scale. Traditional sources are not enough: growing awareness and (re)use of non-traditional data sources (NTD) to fill the gaps in traditional data cast a spotlight on the value of using and combining new data sources for problem-solving. Over the next year, NTD sources could increasingly be called upon by decision-making to address large-scale public problems.

NTD refers to data that is “digitally captured (for example, mobile phone records and financial data), mediated (for example, social media and online data), or observed (for example, satellite imagery),” using new instrumentation mechanisms and is often privately held. Our recent report discussed how COVID-19 was a “watershed moment” in terms of generating access to non-traditional health, mobility, economic, and sentiment data. As detailed in the report, decision-makers around the world increasingly recognize the potential of NTD sources when combined with traditional data responsibly. Similarly, developments in the war in Ukraine presented a pivotal moment regarding the use of NTD sources. For instance, satellite images, social media narrative trends, and real-time location mapping have supported humanitarian action and peacebuilding.

These are just two examples of the increasing interest in NTD to solve public problems. We predict that this trend could continue to expand as technological advances continue to make non-traditional data more widely available to decision-makers. Already, the financial sector is increasingly incorporating non-traditional data to inform decisions such as assessing lending risks, for example. Recently, the fintech business Nova Credit and HSBC partnered together to exploit cross-border data to allow immigrants access to credit by predicting creditworthiness via digital footprint and psychometric data. This trend is compounded by increased legislation aiming to open up the re-use of private sector data, particularly in Europe. The increased attention to NTD sources signals a need to prioritize the alignment of the supply and demand of NTD and develop a systematized approach to how it can be integrated within decision-making cycles…(More)”.

Recentring the demos in the measurement of democracy

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Article by Seema Shah: “Rethinking how we measure and evaluate democratic performance is vital to reversing a longstanding negative trend in global democracy. We must confront the past, including democracy’s counter-intuitively intrinsic inequality. This is key to revitalising institutions in a way that allows democratic practice to live up to its potential…

In the global democracy assessment space, teams like the one I lead at International IDEA compete to provide the most rigorous, far-reaching and understandable set of democracy measurements in the world. Alexander Hudson explains how critical these indicators are, providing important benchmarks for democratic growth and decline to policymakers, governments, international organisations, and journalists.

Yet in so many ways, the core of what these datasets measure and help assess are largely the same. This redundancy is no doubt at least partially a product of wealthy donors’ prioritisation of liberal democracy as an ideal. It is compounded by how the measures are calculated. As Adam Przeworksi recently stated, reliance on expert coders runs the risk of measuring little other than those experts’ biases.

But if that is the case, and quantitative measurements continue to be necessary for democracy assessment, shouldn’t we rethink exactly what we are measuring and how we are measuring it?..

Democracy assessment indices do not typically measure ordinary people’s evaluations of the state of democracy. Instead, other specialised ‘barometers’ often take on this task. See, for example, Afrobarometer, Eurobarometer, Asian Barometer, and Latinobarometro. Surveys of public perceptions on a range of issues also exist, including, but not limited to democracy. The problem is, however, that these do not systematically make it into overall democracy assessments or onto policymakers’ desks. This means that policymakers and others do not consistently prioritise or consider lived experiences as they make decisions about democracy and human rights-related funding and interventions…(More)”.

Accelerate Aspirations: Moving Together to Achieve Systems Change

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Report by Data.org: “To solve our greatest global challenges, we need to accelerate how we use data for good. But to truly make data-driven tools that serve society, we must re-imagine data for social impact more broadly, more inclusively, and in a more interdisciplinary way. 

So, we face a choice. Business as usual can continue through funding and implementing under-resourced and siloed data projects that deliver incremental progress. Or we can think and act boldly to drive equitable and sustainable solutions. 

Accelerate Aspirations: Moving Together to Achieve Systems Change is a comprehensive report on the key trends and tensions in the emerging field of data for social impact…(More)”.

Here’s how the agricultural sector can solve its data problem

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Article by Satyanarayana Jeedigunta and Arushi Goel: “Food and nutrition security, skewed distribution of farmer incomes, natural disasters and climate change are severely impacting the sustainability of agricultural systems across the globe. Policy reforms are needed to correct these distortions, but innovative emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed ledger technologies, sensors and drones, can make a significant difference.

Emerging technologies need data, and it must be the right data, for the right purpose at the right time. This is how it can deliver maximum impact. Agricultural value chains comprise a complex system of stakeholders and activities. The enormity of the size and complexity of agricultural data, coupled with its fragmented nature, pose significant challenges to unlocking its potential economic value, estimated at $65 billion in India alone….

As such, there is a need to promote standards-based interoperability, which enables multiple digital systems to exchange agricultural data in an automated manner with limited human intervention. The ease and speed of such an exchange of data, across domains and technologies, would spur the development of innovative solutions and lead to evidence-driven, prediction-based decision-making on the farm and in the market.

Most agricultural data is dynamic

Most current efforts to develop standards of agriculture data are isolated and localized. The AGROVOC initiative of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization addresses a part of the data problem by creating an exhaustive vocabulary of agricultural terms. There is also a need to develop an open data format for the automated interchange of agriculture data. A coordinated initiative of the industry is an attractive approach to develop such a format…(More)”.

Database States

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Essay by Sanjana Varghese: “In early 2007, a package sent from the north of England to the National Audit Office (NAO) in London went missing. In it were two discs containing the personal records of twenty-five million people—including their addresses, birthdays, and national insurance numbers, which are required to work in the UK—that the NAO intended to use for an “independent survey” of the child benefits database to check for supposed fraud. Instead, that information was never recovered, a national scandal ensued, and the junior official who mailed the package was fired.

The UK, as it turns out, is not particularly adept at securing its data. In 2009, a group of British academics released a report calling the UK a “database state,” citing the existence of forty-six leaky databases that were poorly constructed and badly maintained. Databases that they examined ranged from one on childhood obesity rates (which recorded the height and weight measurements of every school pupil in the UK between the ages of five and eleven) to IDENT1, a police database containing the fingerprints of all known offenders. “In too many cases,” the researchers wrote, “the public are neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information, invading every aspect of our lives.”

In the years since, databases in the UK—and elsewhere—have only proliferated; increasingly manufactured and maintained by a nexus of private actors and state agencies, they are generated by and produce more and more information streams that inevitably have a material effect on the populations they’re used by and against. More than just a neutral method of storing information, databases shape and reshape the world around us; they aid and abet the state and private industry in matters of surveillance, police violence, environmental destruction, border enforcement, and more…(More)”.

Open Government and Climate Change

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Paper by the World Bank: “The world needs more urgent and ambitious action to address climate change. Seventy-one countries have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Nevertheless, achieving decarbonization and adapting to climate change will require fundamental changes in the production of goods and services by firms and the consumption patterns and behavior of citizens. Climate change poses difficult challenges for policy makers, and three particular challenges make the open government principles of transparency, participation, and accountability especially important. First, countries often face the political challenge of credibly committing to climate action over the long term, in that they must commit to action over multiple electoral cycles if the private sector, households, communities, and public entities are to adopt new technologies and change behavior. Second, climate change requires coordination between government and nongovernment actors, as there will be winners and losers along the way and governments will need to work toward consensus to balance the outcomes. Third, governments have to translate promises into climate action. The principles of open government can be especially useful in tackling all three challenges by harnessing and ensuring citizen trust in government and in the legitimacy of climate-directed policy decisions. This note will show how the use of open government principles and mechanisms can make a notable contribution to climate change action. It provides examples of such measures as well as an inventory of existing good practices and tools, which can serve as a source of inspiration for policy makers and citizens alike…(More)”.

AI governance and human rights: Resetting the relationship

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Paper by Kate Jones: “Governments and companies are already deploying AI to assist in making decisions that can have major consequences for the lives of individual citizens and societies. AI offers far-reaching benefits for human development but also presents risks. These include, among others, further division between the privileged and the unprivileged; erosion of individual freedoms through surveillance; and the replacement of independent thought and judgement with automated control.

Human rights are central to what it means to be human. They were drafted and agreed, with worldwide popular support, to define freedoms and entitlements that would allow every human being to live a life of liberty and dignity. AI, its systems and its processes have the potential to alter the human experience fundamentally. But many sets of AI governance principles produced by companies, governments, civil society and international organizations do not mention human rights at all. This is an error that requires urgent correction.

This research paper aims to dispel myths about human rights; outline the principal importance of human rights for AI governance; and recommend actions that governments, organizations, companies and individuals can take to ensure that human rights are the foundation for AI governance in future…(More)”.

Kid-edited journal pushes scientists for clear writing on complex topics

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Article by Mark Johnson: “The reviewer was not impressed with the paper written by Israeli brain researcher Idan Segev and a colleague from Switzerland.

“Professor Idan,” she wrote to Segev. “I didn’t understand anything that you said.”

Segev and co-author Felix Schürmann revised their paper on the Human Brain project, a massive effort seeking to channel all that we know about the mind into a vast computer model. But once again the reviewer sent it back. Still not clear enough. It took a third version to satisfy the reviewer.

“Okay,” said the reviewer, an 11-year-old girl from New York named Abby. “Now I understand.”

Such is the stringent editing process at the online science journal Frontiers for Young Minds, where top scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, submit papers on gene-editing, gravitational waves and other topics — to demanding reviewers ages 8 through 15.

Launched in 2013, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based publication is coming of age at a moment when skeptical members of the public look to scientists for clear guidance on the coronavirus and on potentially catastrophic climate change, among other issues. At Frontiers for Young Minds, the goal is not just to publish science papers but also to make them accessible to young readers like the reviewers. In doing so, it takes direct aim at a long-standing problem in science — poor communication between professionals and the public.

“Scientists tend to default to their own jargon and don’t think carefully about whether this is a word that the public actually knows,” said Jon Lorsch, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “Sometimes to actually explain something you need a sentence as opposed to the one word scientists are using.”

Dense language sends a message “that science is for scientists; that you have to be an ‘intellectual’ to read and understand scientific literature; and that science is not relevant or important for everyday life,” according to a paper published last year in Advances in Physiology Education.

Frontiers for Young Minds, which has drawn nearly 30 million online page views in its nine years, offers a different message on its homepage: “Science for kids, edited by kids.”..(More)”.